


never the last

by cosmya



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Costume Parties & Masquerades, Depressed Thirteen, F/F, Fluff, Post-Library River Song, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28340649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmya/pseuds/cosmya
Summary: At a masquerade ball in twentieth-century France, the Doctor searches for a mystery. She should know by now that River is never a mystery for long.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/River Song
Comments: 3
Kudos: 91





	never the last

The invitation had dictated a time - seven PM, GMT+1 - but the Doctor had always taken that sort of thing as a suggestion rather than an order. She was not one for taking orders from slips of paper, no matter how gilded they were, or how curly the font was. She had also decided that the formal dress code had some wiggle room, and though the address listed probably _meant_ the front door, it was not _really_ trespassing if she were to enter from somewhere else. Especially if that somewhere else was _inside_ the castle.

Also, the invitation hadn’t actually been addressed to her, but that was the least of her concern.

This was one of those serendipitous occasions where she had read about a strange and probably dangerous occurrence that happened to be in a place that Ryan, Yaz, and Graham would want to go. Those were the best ones. For her, at least. Whenever she suddenly wanted to go to a seemingly random, uninhabited planet, or a boring time period in a boring place, or, quote-unquote, let the Tardis decide, she had a bad habit of dancing around her intentions. 

The masquerade ball that had occurred at a minor castle in the south of France on an unusually warm night in January 1902 was not the sort of thing to land in anyone’s history books. There was no great tragedy, and everybody had generally agreed it to be a good time. Most hadn’t noticed anything strange about their fellow attendees.

A few had. All but one took the secret to their graves. But one is all it ever takes for a story to spread.

It was the sort of thing that only travels around the right types of circles, and was only ever spoken of in whispers, as the going beliefs hovered somewhere between embarrassment and fear at writing such nonsense down. The Doctor had heard of it several hundred years prior, in fact, but when she heard the legend repeated nearly word-for-word at an ice-skating rink on Pluto in 9075, she thought it might finally be time to check it out.

The Empty Mask. The face-with-no-face-underneath. It’s always pitch black with twinkling stars and planets dotting the shiny surface. It’s said that they’re in slightly different places each time it’s seen. 

Nobody ever sees it in any direction but head-on, like it’s afraid for anybody to see the void it hides. A little urban-legendy for the Doctor’s tastes, but everybody needs a break sometimes.

As expected, her proposal to attend a twentieth-century French ball had been met with enthusiasm.

They had spent a good six hours on arts and crafts. Ryan had created a faceted, diamond-white mask that rested gracefully on his cheekbones; Yaz a shining maroon one with swirling and spiking gold patterns; and Graham an entire hat in the distinctive shape of an owl.

The Doctor isn’t quite as concerned about her own mask, because the venue means that she can wear _tails_ , and she’s been wanting to do that for quite a long time. The striped mask she’s cobbled together matches the lining of her coat, but she’ll probably ditch it the first chance she gets.

At six-thirty sharp, the Tardis appears in the dusty basement of the castle. 

“Alright, team. Game plan,” she begins to announce.

Yaz holds up a finger to stop her. “You said we were just attending a ball.”

The Doctor backpedals. “We are. ‘Course. The game plan is that we go up there and we have fun.”

Graham doesn’t look convinced; he checks his watch. “We’re half an hour early.”

“Yep,” the Doctor agrees brightly. “I figured thirty minutes is enough time to snoop around. Haven’t you always wanted to see the parts of castles they don’t show you on the tours?”

Ryan is already glancing around in agreement. “Meet back here at seven?”

The Doctor winks and turns on her heel to check the darkest corners and the locked doors, but Yaz jogs up next to her. “What are we _really_ here for?”

“Well…” the Doctor tuts, weighing whether to dodge the question. 

“Are we ghost hunting? Graham’s gonna kill you if we’re ghost hunting.”

“We’re not ghost hunting,” the Doctor quickly replies, as though this is the most far-fetched thing in the world. “Well. Maybe. Sort of. It’s not really a ghost. But. Some mildly spooky vibes, I suppose.”

“How spooky are we talking?” Yaz asks as they approach a small coiling staircase. There’s no light shining from the top of it.

The Doctor hums. “Three out of ten, max.” She begins to ascend the staircase in an uncomfortable bent fashion, feeling the rough stone of each stair ahead of her for anything that seems out of place.

When she gets to the top, there’s no door. Just a blank wall. “So it’s one of _those_ castles,” she says to herself.

“One of which castles?” Yaz asks from the bottom of the stairs.  
  
“The trick kind. Stairways to nowhere, like this one, doors that open to blank walls, windows that you can only see from the outside. Rooms with no doors, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, to deter the ghosts?” says Yaz sarcastically. 

The Doctor goes back down the stairs and shrugs. “Never underestimate paranoia.”

Yaz smiles. “Speaking of which. We’d better go get Graham.”

Thirty minutes later and their exploration has revealed nothing, but that’s enough to support the Doctor’s hypothesis that the Empty Mask isn’t tied to certain places, tricky or not; it just shows up randomly. At the fashionably late hour of 7:02PM, they head upstairs. 

“People sure were punctual back then,” Ryan comments on the very full entrance hall they’ve strolled into. The party is in full swing, and their outfits that had looked outlandish in the dim light of the basement are now drowned out in the rainbow sea. “Masks on?”

The Doctor grins, holding hers up to her face. “Anyone for a dance?”

She has no intention of dancing, but the ballroom will be the best place to people-watch. Er, alien watch. A rousing waltz emanates from the string quintet in the far corner, and it’s difficult not to sway along. The Doctor squints through the crowd. Definitely all human.

The ballroom itself is as gold as the invitation, with a grand marble staircase opposite the mahogany doors and pillars stretching into a ceiling sponge-painted to look like the midday sky. They’re only a few feet inside before Yaz is asked to dance, and she accepts dreamily, already forgetting about the alleged spookiness. 

“Guess that’s that, then,” says Ryan. “Think they have snacks - sorry, _hors d'oeuvres_ \- anywhere?”

“We’ll go find us some,” Graham says, though it’s muffled slightly by the owl mask. “You coming, Doctor?”

“Nah, I’ve got a date.” She snorts before either of them can express any disbelief. “Kidding. I’ll be along. Don’t worry about me.”

Ryan narrows his eyes at her, and Graham probably does too, but it’s hard to tell for sure. But they leave her, and she thinks they’ll probably have a better time without her anyway.

First, she traces the perimeter of the ballroom, avoiding swaying couples and little spindly card tables and stiff-backed servers carrying trays laden with elegant champagne flutes. Everybody appears to be normal and pleasant and composed, except maybe Yaz, who the Doctor can see a little ways away, looking like she’s been transported into a Disney film. And if that’s the case, the Doctor is the prince who can’t find her Cinderella.

“Empty Mask, Empty Mask, Empty Mask,” she mutters to herself as she searches the crowd, the words getting louder each time she repeats them, but the waltz too is growing louder, and soon she can’t hear the words over its gleeful tune. “No, no, this isn’t working,” she mouths, abandoning the search to find a secluded corner in which she can pull out the sonic and scan for alien life forms. 

But each time she thinks she might have a moment of secrecy, she sees somebody else watching _her_ , and she isn’t looking to get kicked out of the party before she’s found who she’s looking for. 

Defeated, she climbs the marble stairs, traipsing along the balcony that lines the ballroom, then leans her elbows on the railing, her mouth scrunching up in frustration at herself. She tosses her mask onto one of the brocade-patterned chairs, tired of holding it up.

She never tells her companions about the emptiness. She tries to shake it off, more so than she ever had to before. They help a lot. They do. But they can’t stop her engineering these moments alone where she can indulge in the chilly feeling of loss.

What begins as her searching the room once more quickly dissolves into misty-eyed torpor. This was a feeble attempt at fun. She doesn’t even like dancing, at least not when she’s made to do it with a partner, and her alien lead probably won’t even show up. There’s a distant sense of happiness that everybody else is having fun. She knows it would slip through her fingers if she tried to grasp it.

Her eyes are nearly shut when a hand touches her shoulder.

She wheels around like she’s been woken from a dreamless slumber. 

“Would you like to dance?” a familiar yet unplaceable voice says from an unseen mouth. 

It’s the mask, alright. A chasm in the shape of a face; the holes for the eyes might as well not exist if not for the lack of those twinkling sparkles that dot the rest of the mask. The Doctor had imagined it being beautiful. It’s more than that, though. She is transfixed.

What an ensemble - how had none of the stories ever mentioned it was more than just a mask? 

The body, if that’s what it is, is concealed in a shimmery amber dress, extending the length of the arms down to the gloved hands and pooling lightly on the tile floor. It’s almost perfect, but there’s one thing proving that it’s an illusion of a person. The turtleneck of the dress has slipped down the neck but a few millimeters. Between the mask and the fabric, the Doctor can see candlelight. A glass mannequin, filled with voice but not flesh.

But the most interesting thing about it is that the dress’s shape is one that the Doctor would recognize after a thousand years of absence. Her face lights up.

The mask tilts a few degrees to the side. “Hello, sweetie.”

If the sight isn’t perfect, the sound of her voice is.

“River,” the Doctor blurts, unable to string together anything more intelligent. “H-how... ? What’re you…?”

“You didn’t answer,” she says. “Would you dance with me? We can stay up here, if you like.”

The Doctor shakes the confusion off and smiles. “I’m just... happy to see you. You know. Even more so if I could, you know, see you. I… I thought the last time was… was it.”

River extends a gloved hand, and the Doctor takes it. Even through the fabric, she can feel the hollow cold, but at least now she believes that River isn’t an illusion, or worse, a hallucination. No, when River pulls her in for a hug, it’s the rest of the castle that feels like an illusion.

Her voice is warm in the Doctor’s ear as their hands slip into place and they begin to sway out of time with the overly fast tempo. “We don’t just lay around all day sunbathing in the library, you know.”

“So you got out,” breathes the Doctor. “Well. Virtually. I don’t suppose _you_ of all people would choose to stop having a body.”

River chuckles; the Doctor can feel the soft flutter of glass lungs against her chest. “We haven’t perfected it yet.” She leans back so the Doctor can see the mask, see that this is a mere container for River, albeit an appropriately beautiful one. “Something with the wavelength of our projections skipping over the visible spectrum for humans, and evidently Time Lords too, no matter how we tune it. You’d be able to see me just fine in infrared,” she explains with a wink in her voice. “That’s why I’ve been keeping to places where a mask is appropriate, and anyway, I can only reach certain times and places where the tides are right. I was patient. I knew I’d lure you in eventually.”

“How’d you know what I look like now?”

River shrugs. “I didn’t. But after the last time… I’ll always recognize you. You leave signs.”

The Doctor bites her lip. Lately she’s not exactly happy about the signs she thinks she’s been leaving. River seems to sense the sudden stiffness in the Doctor’s dancing, the tension of fighting back sadness. She pulls her closer, telling her that she needn’t be so guarded, and the Doctor hopes that River won’t shatter from the force of what she’s been bottling.

“Your… invisibility problem. I bet I could fix it,” the Doctor says quietly. 

If River smiles, it goes unseen and unfelt, and the Doctor decides that that is among the universe’s greatest injustices. “I would love to see you try.”

“I would love to see _you_.” She lets go of the cold fabric, and after a glance down into the ballroom to make sure nobody’s wondering where she’s been, she nods her head off to the left, toward an empty hallway. 

They find a quiet sitting room, the kind with its own fireplace and matching baby-blue furniture that nobody ever uses. The curtains are drawn, the candles cold, but the fire is lit. The Doctor shuts the door and pulls the sonic out of her jacket. She’s stunned for a moment when River sits on the floor close to the fire and the mask lights up like a prism. 

However pretty this is, it’s worthless compared to what will be underneath if she’s successful. She kneels down next to River and points the sonic directly towards where her face should be. 

The Doctor takes a deep breath and holds it. She’s never been so grateful that the sonic can interpret clearly-thought commands from her unkempt feelings, her gnarled desires, her peat bog of a mind, because that’s all she can offer right now.

Well, that and a few thoughts about syncing wavelengths and forcing spectral boundaries, but those are shaped by the hope for those nights when everything actually works out correctly and she can rest. After a silent shift in the dim light of the sitting room, the mask clatters to the floor and breaks, and the illusion turns corporeal. River beams. And then, before the Doctor can even get a good look at her, River leans forward and does what she always does.

And the Doctor knows that whatever she did worked. The lips pressing against hers are not glass, nor cold, nor lifeless. They’re simply River’s.

Once talking seems more gratifying than kissing, the Doctor pulls away, aware that she’s blushing. “Definitely didn’t think I’d ever do _that_ again,” she admits, unsure of whether she means kissing River or kissing anybody at all.

“I knew I would,” says River with a wink. “So, Doctor. Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m not sure I know much more than you do. Only been like this for… I don’t know.” She frowns. “ I _actually_ don’t know.”

River’s eyes narrow. She’s running her fingers over the fireplace-warmed marble tile, maybe reminding herself of what reality feels like. “I’d like to see you finding out.”

“I bet you would.” The Doctor doesn’t really know what she means by that. She’s adrift. To forge ahead alone, to find out the expanse of possibilities within this regeneration, that sounds good. River helping with that, that sounds good, too. Even dwelling on what she and River used to be, all of those different dynamics and different faces, is something she yearns for in a way. But it’s not a painful ache anymore. She wasn’t wrong when she decided to let that go. But now that River’s right in front of her, well, how could she not miss what that was like?

She looks into River’s eyes; they have the same sparkle as the stars on the mask. It’s _River_ , for goodness’ sake. The Doctor smiles. Oh, go on. One adventure. 

She straightens up, her resolve cemented. She would be a fool to fear regression. River certainly proved the invalidity of that fear. “So… where do you want to go? The Tardis is downstairs, I can just go grab Graham and Ryan and Yaz, and we can go off wherever you like-” The Doctor stops herself when she sees River’s smile take on a sad wash.

Oh, no. Oh no oh no oh no.

“I want to stay right here,” River says clearly, without any hint of melancholy. “I want to stay as long as I can, and I want to listen.”

The _for now_ goes unsaid. The _while we still can._

Of course this is the case.

“How long do you have?” the Doctor asks, even though she already sort of knows. Maybe that’s what she is now. The one who lets it go when it’s gone. The one who has learned that moving on isn’t always a bad thing.

She tries to fight the urge to _fix_ whatever is giving River a limited time with her. She fights it, because she can’t be wasting her brainpower doing anything other than simply… having a wonderful night with her wife who she never thought she would see again. It would be a shame to complicate that.

“A couple hours,” River says brightly, as if a couple hours is more than she could have asked for. 

“Midnight, right?” The Doctor chuckles. “‘S always midnight. In that case, we’re going to stay right here, Cinderella.”

“No,” River cautions, standing up. “You’re going to introduce me to your friends, first. And then you can have me to yourself.” She winks.

“They’ll like you,” the Doctor answers. “Then again, I don’t think you’re the easiest person to introduce.”

“That would be a horrible thing to be.”

Overcome with sudden emotion, the Doctor bites her lip, then takes River’s hand, pulling the glove off. Something as simple as the feeling of skin contact makes her feel more alive than she has since the regeneration energy wore off. “Time alone would be nice,” she whispers, like she isn’t sure whether she’s ready for anybody to hear such an admission.

But River always hears her. “What are we waiting for, then?”

She stands up to leave and the Doctor follows her out the door. 

“Wait,” she says once they reach the stairs heading down into the quieting ballroom. She wants to ask the next time when River can leave the library so she can travel there once the weight of missing her becomes too much again.

But River never had the luxury of that foresight, not with their timelines woven together so haphazardly into the fabric of spacetime. Perhaps they wouldn’t be what they were if they knew the journey had no end. Or if they had let themselves accept that diaries don’t contain objective truth.

 _Say goodbye like you’re going to come back_ , as River had said at Trenzalore. Their orbits will cross if the Doctor only trusts.

“Never mind,” she says, and River knows better than to ask what she was going to say. 

“Thank you for finding me.”

The Doctor knows what she means. She knows this one time isn’t the last time, even if it’s a thousand years until they can see each other again. It’s never the last night. River always finds a way out. And the Doctor can always be found.

  
  



End file.
